Wednesday, October 18, 2006

The Berlin Wall Per Gorbachev

Oh, I'm sure that the twits of this world will fall all over themselves repeating Gorbachev's comparison of the Berlin Wall to the wall the US is thinking of building on the US-Mexican border:

"You remember President Reagan standing in Berlin and saying, 'This wall should be torn down,'" said the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner. "Now the United States seems to be building almost the Wall of China between itself and this other nation with which it has been associated for many decades and has had cooperation and interaction with."

There are, of course, a few minor technical differences between the two situations which do not reflect well on Gorbachev and his attempts to make a living on the US-hating lecture circuit. These include:

The Berlin Wall was built by the Soviet bloc to prevent its citizens from getting out, not by the NATO bloc to prevent the refugees from getting in.

The refugees from the Soviet bloc were fleeing a tyrannical system; those coming over the Mexican/US border are almost entirely composed of economic refugees.

The US immigration policy is structured to favor Berlin Wall-type refugees from tyranny today, and it is the huge inflow of economic refugees that prevents our system from providing adequate refuge to such immigrants now.

And now let's discuss the extreme hypocrisy involved in this statement of Gorbachev's:

"Maybe if global warming results in melting the ice in Greenland, there will be an island where those who would like to separate themselves from the rest of the world could live," he quipped. "But then of course we'll have to work this out with Denmark."

Every other developed nation has been driven to adopt similar measures, because of the difference in the standard of living between developed and underdeveloped nations. That includes all the EU nations. Last year the commission on economic immigration agreed:

Any common policy to manage legal migration in Europe is inevitably linked to security issues and to the need to fight illegal immigration effectively. All members of the committee agreed that it must be up to each Member State to decide how many immigrants it can accept on its territory and on what conditions. However, the system chosen to manage legal and illegal migration in an EU country has a clear effect on other Member States. In that connection, MEPs pointed out that the mass regularisation of illegal immigrants carried out by countries such as Spain "is no substitute for substantial policies for dealing with illegal immigration or an effective means of recruiting economic migrants".

Oh, if only the US were allowed to be judged by the same standard with which the EU judges its own nations. If only. Anyone want to discuss Mexico's policy towards would-be economic immigration to Mexico? I didn't think so. Anyone want to discuss Saudi Arabia's policy? Indeed not. Japan's? Nah. The EU's? Hahaha. Most EU nations are still blocking economic immigration from many of the EU countries! It's as if New York refused to allow people from New Jersey to come and work there! And now countries like the UK which have followed a more open policy are thinking about it changing it.I have about had it with the talking heads of the EuroTwit circuit. They are hypocritical and disingenuous in the extreme, and they show no shame. There is an ethical problem in the world today with regard to economic immigration, and in some ways it is the same problem posed by the Berlin Wall: the unfortunate citizens of failed cultures and failed governments are so desperate that they will die to escape those systems. How to bring hope to those people, who would overwhelm all the functional societies in the world today if they were permitted to follow their dreams, requires changing the systems from which they flee. How? That is the ethical question. How?

That is the lesson of and the question posed by the Berlin Wall, and if Gorbachev were honest he would speak of that lesson. But he isn't honest.

In the meantime, China is building a wall to prevent the North Koreans from escaping their living hell. I wonder if Gorbachev will speak of that? I think not.